I don’t know how much you are into movies. But I used to be a movie lover. Way back in 1982 I bought my first VHS machine. At that time there were a couple of different versions of video tape players. I remember going to Sears and trying to decide if I was going to buy a VHS made by a company named JVC or if I should buy a Betamax player made by Sony. The only thing I knew for sure they were expensive. If I remember right the one I bought cost close to $700. But I could not believe the technology.
The next thing I discovered was that you had to go to a place called a video store and there you could buy or rent a video tape. I was living in Tumwater, Washington in an apartment with six other Ironworkers at that time and it had been my and one of my partner’s task to buy the player, while two other guys figured out how this tape thing worked. They were the ones who found out that in the Olympia/Tumwater area there was only two such stores in existence. They also found out that to rent a tape you were put on a waiting list for just about any movie. The explanation was that the movie industry was fighting the idea of allowing people to see movies in the comfort of their own homes tooth and nail. Everyone thought it was the end of the movie theater, the end of an era. And in many ways, they were right.
It certainly was the end of an era for me. As a kid growing up in Chicago I had loved movies, but I had really loved movie theaters. On Saturday mornings all of us neighborhood kids would end up at the York theater and for 25 cents you could watch two westerns, a whole slew of cartoons and a couple of serials. For another quarter eat enough popcorn and JuJubes to give you a belly ache for a week. I remember the smell and the feel of that theater. The vastness of it. Nothing compared. To me it was my church.
I mean at the time on Sunday, the very next day, I would be with my family at Mass. The 9:00 am service. But as I sat it that newly built, modern cathedral I did not feel at home or was I in tune with what was happening. I knew who Randolph Scott was, but I sure did not know who God was or why I had to worship Him. So, I found it much easier to worship the idols I saw and knew than the One who was invisible. The vastness of that church was cold and did not compare to the York theater.
I never lost those feelings, even though I attended a Catholic seminary. It was a great place of learning and I love the comradery of a boarding school. But it was when I could escape to a movie theater or in years to come, a bar that I would feel most at home. And the fact is once I left the seminary and I was on my own I never entered a church as a place of worship until 2010. I did not mourn it or miss it. But with the dawn of the home movie age, I loved the convenience but missed and mourned the loss of the old theaters.
When I first was being opened by the Holy Spirit through the Bible I kept going back in my mind to those years as a kid. It was strange that I saw Saturday as my day of worship back then. True it was of man and not God, but I still found it ironic that the first thing I was convicted of was the Saturday Sabbath. And even weirder to me was now as I began to know this God who was such a stranger to me, I was drawn to His place of worship and felt as much at home there as I once did in the York theater.
Now a days I attend a church that is not a vast cathedral, just a simple house of God. But my heart swells when I go in there on Saturday morning and it resembles that feeling from my youth. In fact, it is much better because the God I worship now is not up on a screen or does he ride away into the sunset at the end of a movie. He is eternal, and He is truly worthy of my worship. And I take these words from Isaiah the prophet seriously, “If you turn your foot from the Sabbath, from doing your pleasure on my holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight and the holy day of the Lord honorable, if you honor it, not going your own ways or seeking your own pleasure, or talking idly; then you will find your joy in the LORD, and I will cause you to ride in triumph on the heights of the land…” (Isaiah 58:13-14 part) Now I am the one who gets to ride in triumph into the sunset and my Saturday is key to my relationship with the Lord. How cool is that!
Kids today might never know the wonders of the old movie houses. Since the invention of the VHS, the era of on demand everything is burgeoned into a mind absorbing machine. Gone are the days of the Saturday Matinee, that is unless you join me tomorrow for God’s eternal day. His showing and that of His son will out shine and outlast any afterglow of a day at the movies. Thing is, I want a front row seat in His kingdom, minus the JuJubes and but till then I will be blessed sitting in the second pew of our local church.
Blessings and Happy Sabbath, John
4/13/18
